Posts Filed Under wine review

For all of my talk about not digging big-ass wines, I sure do seem to end up talking about a lot of “good” big-ass wines.

Take this past Christmas, for example.

We host some of my wife’s family every third Christmas or so, as part of a rotation that has us visiting them in Florida and Washington on the other years. It’s a special time for me, because Mrs. Dudette has a great extended family, full of genuinely nice people who are kind enough to put up with me over the course of several days (primarily because they want to spend time with my daughter, I suspect… but I’m quite happy to settle for the delusion that they also enjoy my company). And when we host Christmas, Mrs. Dudette cooks a gourmet meat-and-potatoes feast in honor of her late grandmother, who succumbed to Alzheimer’s quite a few years ago but in her heyday apparently made a mean roast dinner.

The slow-roasted meat naturally gets me thinking about a big red, and for some reason, despite reservations,I find myself continually reaching for Mondavi Reserve wines for this holiday dinner thang. I mean, if Christmas dinner isn’t when you’re supposed to open up wines like these, then well the hell are you supposed to pop those corks?

I use the term “despite reservations” because, truth be told (don’t you hate that phrase, by the way? I mean, it’s not like I’ve been lying to you for years and am only now getting aroud to making statements with any veracity… ok, whatever…) I am always afraid that the Mondavi Reserve wines are going to burn me…

The “competition” (such as it is, though it really isn’t such) was once again fierce, due to the volume of wines I tried in 2011 (up again from 2010 – considerably) and in the high level of quality of many of the wines to which I had the good fortune of being exposed through hundreds of samples, dozens of visits, blah-blah-blah.

The average price tag of the wines in this year’s list is once again on the high side (around $69), but there’s a price to be paid in creating a product that stirs the emotions, I suppose – the good news is that while several *very* expensive bottles are on the list, some of the best can be had for a relatively-reasonable $35-$40 per bottle.

For those of you who are new all of this and at this point are wondering what the hell I’m raving on about:

I compile this list annually. It is NOT intended to be a “best of” or “highest rating” or “circle jerk” list (no mater what the PR folks do with it!).

It is intended to be a list of arbitrarily-chosen wines that stood out, to me, as being particularly interesting for any number of reasons, not least of which are quality and complexity, and to call attention to those wines that I found most compelling this year – wines that make me want tot tackle the mountain of samples in my basement in search of another that might be somewhat like it. Actually, isn’t that how most non-chemical addictions start? Ah, whatever…

These are not wines released in 2011 (though I try to favor recent releases so that you have a chance of actually trying the wines in this list), they are wines that I tasted in 2011. Not all the wines I tasted in 2011 qualified – the wines have to be at least somewhat available so that you have a shot at trying them.

Also, the list of finalists included some wines tasted in late December 2010 (since this list is compiled in its final form in mid-December).

This year, I’m happy to also announce that the list comes complete with a new badge, created by Mofunsun Enterprises, LLC (a.k.a. design rock-star Jeffrey Sun) who also designed the badges I use each week in my wine reviews (see above). Producers included in the list below are free to use the MIW badge in any way that they see fit, so long as it is not modified (those interested can contact me for details).

This is, by far, the most difficult content for me to compile each year. No pressure, but if you don’t enjoy it then bah-humbug, you can go sit on an inappropriate wine-stopper. As in previous years, you will find some surprises in this list.I invite you to react, comment, and have fun, so long as you agree to take it for what it really is: a celebration of wine’s pleasure and subjectivity.

Few things in life taste as sweet (figuratively, anyway) as serendipity.

For me, one of the simplest but most rewarding of life’s little pleasures is to reach randomly in the wine sample pool, and by lucky happenstance come up with something pleasantly surprising – which is exactly what happened to me late last week.

Last Friday, Mrs. Dudette was whipping up an Indian dish, and I was fiddling around with my long-overdue foray into the ownership of a “proper” camera (modest attempts at lowish-light photog are inset here and below… be gentle, please!), when I was tasked with raiding the basement’s ever-expanding world of cardboard shipping boxes to come up with a suitable wine match.

And that’s how I first met Keuka Lake Vineyards. Which turned out to be pretty lucky for me (and for Mrs. Dudette).

In this case, serendipity tastes not sweet but bone-friggin-dry – and while the KLV selection did a fantastic job with my wife’s Tandoori Chicken, that’s not why it’s being featured here this week…

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